The friendship is already over. Here's what the evidence says.

Words by Matt Keenan

Have you ever felt the clarity in the aftermath of something ending? Not during the fight, or the days of silence that follow, but later, when all that’s left is you and the facts. Boston’s Gollylagging knows the feeling all too well. On their new single “Jackknife,” they don’t dramatize the grief like most bands might. Instead, they do something harder and more honest: they lay the body on the table, pick up the instruments, and begin the examination. 

Photo Credit: Renee Newman

I. The Body

As “Jackknife” begins, the death has already happened. There’s no last minute opportunity to save a dying relationship, no dramatic revelations,  Gollylagging isn't interested in the moment of rupture. What they’ve written instead is an examination: what’s left when a friendship ends, and much like an autopsy, they emphasize what you can learn from the wreckage. 

The track moves almost like hands pulling back a sheet, methodically, tenderly, and trying not to look away. It’s layered carefully with electric guitar riffs that give a subtle but emphatic nod to the title. The vocals don’t fall into the all too common folly of being overly accusatory or plead for some sort of romantic return, they assess. This is the sound of someone sitting with the reciepts after their grief. 

II. The Testimony

Of course, in every good autopsy there’s a witness. You’d be hard pressed to find one more compelling than vocalist and guitarist Jake Regulbuto, who says: "'Jackknife' is about the aftermath of friendship fallouts. You can want the best for people but know your relationship to them can't be the same as it used to be." 

The word aftermath does a lot of heavy lifting here, it brings the track’s thematic center firmly in the past tense of feeling. You can actually feel the strange, hollow clarity that arrives later when you’re no longer expecting a text back. “Jackknife” lives in that space: clear eyes and apologetic without being self-flagellating, mournful, or even making a spectacle of the grief. 

III. Time of Death

Production of this record required its own kind of forensic patience, as Drummer Andrew Garas notes: "This one was a tough one to get right. We recorded everything for it in a short six hours and really had to put in a lot of time re-recording things and revising the mix to get it how we wanted it to sound. Our producer, Rowan, helped tremendously and put up with us asking for 10+ revisions on it."

There’s an almost ironic symmetry here, a song about replaying the past was itself built through repetition and revision. Each new mix serves as another therapeutic attempt to get the cause of death exactly right. 

IV. The Scene

The video, directed by bassist Joey Lorant, is shot outside in a local Boston park. Watching through on first glance, it may seem like a strange choice to make it sun-lit and loose with the band goofing around between takes. You come to realize though this makes sense, autopsies happen in clean, bright rooms, and working through reckoning with a loss doesn’t always look like suffering. 

Lorant simply says: "I tried to capture how it feels for us to play the song live, fun and light, featuring us goofing around and strumming along to the track in our neighborhood park." What the end product depicts, whether they meant it this way or not, is the strange lightness that can follow honest reckoning. The band isn’t performing grief, they've done that already. What's left is something almost like relief: the case closed, the findings filed, the friendship given its proper, careful ending.

Be sure to check out Gollylagging's "Jackknife", out now. You can also check out the band’s album release show in Boston on June 19th (flyer down below) and they’ll also be stopping by New York, NY on June 20th.